There is No Moderate islam

Barry Rubin discusses three competing views of islam.

And the spread of the Saudi version, undermining more tolerant Islam as far afield as Indonesia, is also part of the modern Islamist problem.

Muslims are burning churches in Indonesia. If that’s Rubin’s idea of moderate than he is just as clueless as the “islam is a religion of peace” crowd.

Let us assume that the immigration of Muslims to the West was happening 50 or even years ago. This was in a period before Islamism took hold. And so whatever problems did take place–many of them cultural, too–there would be no huge problem as there is today with a powerful Islamist interpretation often dominating the field and controlling organizations and often mosques and schools. There would be no terrorism issue. While many Muslims would want to keep apart and reject Western ways, they would do so quietly and peacefully. While women who became Westernized and anyone wanting to convert to another religion would face some harassment, they would not face a high likelihood of being murdered. The younger generations would become more, not less, comfortable and accommodating with Western society.

I don't believe that islam was less radical 50 years ago. The reason there was no terrorism is because they were too powerless back then. Decades of accumulated wealth from the oil industry has enabled the islamic world to acquire the power needed to wage global jihad today. If you examine the history of islam, whenever it acquired enough power, it waged jihad and conquered other lands and slaughtered non-muslims.

Are Muslims the main victims of radical Islamism or, if you wish, radical Islam? The answer is absolutely yes. Yet if that’s true then what we are dealing with here is a civil war within Islam in which Muslims have chosen different sides, neither a hijacking nor the “inevitable interpretation” of Islam. After all, if the Islamists were impersonators, they would have no support, and if they were unquestionably the correct form of Muslim, they would have all Muslims’ support.

What civil war within islam? Where is the mass movement of moderate muslims confronting the jihadists? The only civil war that does exist is between sunnis and shiites, not between so-called “moderates” and extremists. Read the whole article.